The Rise of Mission-Oriented State Investment Banks: the Cases of Germany’S Kfw and Brazil’S BNDES
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INNOVATION-FUELLED, SUSTAINABLE, INCLUSIVE GROWTH Working Paper The rise of mission-oriented state investment banks: the cases of Germany’s KfW and Brazil’s BNDES Mariana Mazzucato Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Univ. of Sussex, UK Caetano C.R. Penna Institute of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and SPRU, Univ. of Sussex, UK 1/2015 October This project has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action under grant agreement No 649186 The rise of mission-oriented state investment banks: the cases of Germany’s KfW and Brazil’s BNDES Mariana Mazzucato Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Univ. of Sussex, UK Address: University of Sussex Jubilee Building, Room 384 Brighton, United Kindgom, BN1 9SL Email: [email protected] Phone: +44(0)1273-877943 Caetano C.R. Penna (corresponding author) Institute of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and SPRU, Univ. of Sussex, UK Address: UFRJ - Instituto de Economia Campus da Praia Vermelha Av. Pasteur, nº 250, sala 110, Urca Rio de Janeiro – RJ, Brazil, 22290-902 Email: [email protected] Phone: +5521 96510-1210 Abstract This paper focuses on the rise of state investment banks (SIBs) as lead funders of mission- oriented innovation in various countries’ agendas regarding smart (innovation-led) growth, and not just fixers of ‘market failures’. The market failure justification for public finance fails to capture the active mission-oriented role that such banks are playing in shaping and creating markets, rather than just fixing them. In tackling innovation priorities and shaping new markets, these banks are developing new financial tools that also help to reform the financial system from within, addressing issues of short-termism and financialisation. This paper documents and analyses the roles of such banks, building on the Neo-Schumpeterian work on mission-oriented policies (that is, policies that aim to address societal issues or challenges). The paper presents a rich analytical description of mission-oriented investments in two of the leading SIBs: Brazil’s BNDES and Germany’s KfW. We discuss the directionality of the investments, the various tools used, and the lessons to be learned for evaluating these tools outside of a market failure framework. Keywords: State investment banks, mission-oriented policy, societal challenges, public finance, financialisation, innovation JEL codes: G20 (financial institutions and services: general); O16 (economic development: financial markets); O38 (technological change: government policy); L52 (industrial policy); P16 (capitalist systems: political economy) Acknowledgements This paper has been supported by two European Union’s Horizon 2020 grants: No. 649186 - Project ISIGrowth and No. 640772 (Dolfins). We are grateful to two anonymous referees of the SPRU Working Paper Series (SWPS) for their comments and helpful suggestions. 1 1. Introduction Many countries and regions currently have policy objectives of promoting smart (that is, innovation-led) growth agendas that are framed around ‘grand challenges’, such as those related to climate change and the ageing crisis (European Commission, 2011). Accordingly, the need for long-term investments in the real economy to achieve these goals and address societal challenges is enormous. The real question, however, is where the finance will come from to fund such long-term strategies. This question is especially relevant in an era in which the financial sector has become increasingly short-termist (Haldane, 2011; Kay, 2012) and private companies have become increasingly financialised, focused on quarterly stock market performance (Dore, 2008). The case of green energy technologies, which are crucial for tackling climate change, energy security, air pollution, and resource depletion, is paradigmatic. Out of the massive amount of funds managed by institutional investors – US$83 trillion as of 2012 – only US$13 billion (0.016 per cent of the total) was committed to renewable energy projects in the eight years between 2004 and 2012 (Kaminker et al., 2013). And at the same time, the large energy companies are the biggest repurchasers of their own stock, preferring to boost stock prices than to invest in renewable energy innovation (Lazonick, 2013). Therefore, it is clear that the issue is not one of a lack of finance (or ‘credit crunch’), but what type of finance it is and where it goes. Innovation requires patient, long-term finance, not just any type of finance (Mazzucato, 2013b). The present paper deals with the new roles that state investment banks (SIBs)1 play in financing smart (that is, innovation-led) growth, due to private finance retreating from funding the real economy (Haldane, 2011). The paper shows that as private finance has retreated, the need for SIBs to fill the gap has increased. A select number of such public banks are providing counter-cyclical investments and also directing those investments in specific directions, related to technological missions and grand societal challenges. The key contribution of the present paper is to introduce the mission-oriented framework to the analysis of such an active role of SIBs in financing grand challenges. We argue that while the traditional ‘market failure’ framework can explain some of the investments, it is harder for this framework to explain the extensive and deep investments that such banks are providing in high-risk areas along the entire innovation chain. We argue that a ‘mission-oriented’ approach (Foray et al. 2012) is particularly useful for documenting such investments and for evaluating them. On the normative side, we argue that, in light of the policy priorities of achieving smart growth and of reforming the financial system so that long-term investments receive priority over short-term speculative ones, SIBs represent an institutional model to help reform the financial system from within and to achieve smart innovation-led growth. The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses the contemporary context in which the financial system is increasingly inwardly focused, concentrated on achieving speculative short-term profits to the detriment of risky and uncertain financing of long-term projects, and, concomitantly, the real economy itself became speculative and financialised. This trend is contrasted with the policy agenda of achieving smart, inclusive and sustainable growth through policies that also seek to address societal challenges. Section 3 presents the roles of SIBs in the economy, from counter-cyclical and capital development to venture capitalist and mission-oriented. The paper focuses on the third and fourth roles; therefore, section 4 reviews the mission-oriented literature in detail to show that it overlooked the role of SIBs in financing mission-oriented projects. Section 5 presents the 1 Throughout this paper, the terms state investment bank and development bank are used interchangeably. 2 methodology as it is applied to the empirical section 6, which documents the rise of SIBs as venture capitalists and mission-oriented investors. This section focuses on two of the world’s leading SIBs: one from a developing country (the national development bank of Brazil, BNDES) and the other from an industrialised country (Germany’s KfW). Our rich empirical analysis highlights a contemporary trend whereby countries, via SIBs, move toward placing public finance at the centre of the investment and innovation process in order to address contemporary challenges and fulfil their smart, sustainable and inclusive growth agendas. Section 7 reflects on our empirical findings and concludes that, given the characteristics of the new missions (or societal challenges), SIBs seem better positioned than centralised funding agencies to finance related projects, including innovation. The paper finishes with a proposal for areas for future research on mission-oriented SIBs. 2. Financialisation: Who will fund the capital development of the economy? The works of many prominent economists, including Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky, have long pointed to the fact that the character of specific financial structures is not inconsequential to the workings of the real economy and productive enterprises. For instance, Veblen (1904) distinguished between industrial and pecuniary motives and emphasised how the pursuit of pecuniary gains by business managers and investment bankers is often in stark opposition to technological (industrial) advances (Wray, 2012). Keynes also highlighted how ‘speculative’ finance is a threat to the workings of industrial enterprises: Speculators do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes the by- product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism – which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object. (Keynes, 2006 [1936], p. 142–143) As Minsky (1992) put it, this ‘dichotomy between enterprise and speculation draws attention to the financial structure as an